A few people have commented about Yojimbo, including Brent, who gives it a place in his dock. His post has some good points in the comments thread. I’ve already paid for VoodooPad, and put a lot of my brain in there, so I’m not moving my notes anywhere soon. This is a good point to note if you’re thinking of wading into the note-taking app market - if I can’t move my data into your app, it’s unlikely that I”m going to bother using it.
It’s nice to see a real app shipped using Core Data - although the data model appears to be pretty simple. I wonder if they hit any snags developing it? I’d be interested to hear what kind of effort they put into it.
I have a couple of quick nits to pick, in case anyone cares: If you have a three-pane interface, the detail pane has to scroll when I hit the space bar. Especially if it displays web content. Let me say that more clearly: If you display web content, use different key shortcuts than Safari at your own risk.
There’s a useful info inspector for the items, but Cmd-i doesn’t bring it up - it is still trying to italicize something, even if I’m not selecting text. An issue of fit-and-finish I was surprised to see in a BareBones app.
Finally, it’s simple and elegant - it gets the important things right, but I don’t know if it’s really solving a problem that many people have - casual users can store passwords and bookmarks already, and serious researchers have more powerful tools. Maybe the biggest missed opportunity is that a having a single place for all of this data would be a great start towards making it available to other programs, which I think is where the next big leap in computing experience is - think a combination of the iLife media browsers and bookmark/note taking apps, along with a bit of Onlife. That’s what I think the future tastes like…
7:08 pm January 26, 2006
When you say the detail pane, you mean the bottom right content pane right? That scrolls fine for me when I use the spacebar. Do you have the focus set appropriately? Focus doesn’t shift to the content pane when you select an item in the list pane - you either need to click or tab.
…which, as I think about it, is still inconsistent with apps like Mail, NNW, and Mailsmith…
“Maybe the biggest missed opportunity is that a having a single place for all of this data would be a great start towards making it available to other programs, which I think is where the next big leap in computing experience is - think a combination of the iLife media browsers and bookmark/note taking apps, along with a bit of Onlife. That’s what I think the future tastes like…”
yes yes YES! I agree. I think things like Spotlight, Onlife, and Yojimbo are a good start toward this. Right now, I can find things anywhere, or I can explicitly store and group them in certain ways - but I think the next big leap is in starting to make some of those connections implicit. On the work life side, it’s kind of like MS’s Project Center in Office 2004 (contacts, documents, events all married together), but with system-level APIs to get at that information. On the non-work side, it’s sorta like Onlife and yojimbo - or even Memory Miner - let’s see the connections between email, music, pictures, etc.
-blake
Eric, you’re right - I tried the Mail/NNW-style spacebar and didn’t bother trying to give the detail pane focus first. So it’s not breaking with Safari as much as with Mail, but I’d have to say it’s still a little annoying.
Michael,
The italic/bold thing is a bug with how Cocoa wires those actions to the NSFontManager.
The same thing happens in Apple Mail, TextEdit, iChat, etc. There are down sides to relying on the system to provide rich frameworks - sometimes you are stuck with their bugs.